The valley below the terrace did not miraculously heal back into the hidden sanctuary it had been before the drills and the bell. The upper Quiet Spring remained a dry bowl of cracked white silt, and the old cold-water moss along its rim was already turning brown in the wind.
Instead, the diverted stream had settled into a chain of three wider, shallower seepage pools along the lower limestone bench, steaming slightly where the warm fault rock met the surface runoff.
On the third afternoon, Ashaun walked down to the edge of the middle pool with her small leather seed pouch tucked under her chin. She knelt in the damp grey silt, planted her translucent stone left forearm squarely in the mud to balance her weight, and used the thumb and forefinger of her right hand to poke shallow holes an inch apart along the watermark.
Into each hole she dropped two of the flat, dark marsh-grain seeds Mother Suth had saved from Ashaun’s burned village forty-three years ago. She covered them with wet silt and patted the earth firm with her palm. They were hardy lowland seeds meant for ditch banks and mill ponds; they did not care that the water here came from a cracked sacred basin, so long as the mud was warm and the sun reached the ledge for four hours a day.
